There has been a proliferation of multimedia libraries, such as digital image, digital video and digital audio libraries, in the recent past. This is due, at least in part, to the ease of digitalization of images, video and audio through, for example, the widespread use of digital cameras, digital video and digital voice recorders and the availability of the Internet as a medium for accessing and exchanging these media in an efficient manner. It is becoming increasingly important for image processing systems to organize these multimedia libraries to provide capabilities for browsing, searching and retrieval of image data in these multimedia libraries.
The explosive growth of multimedia libraries and other archives has made searching for specific information increasingly more difficult. This difficulty is due, at least in part, to a lack of tools to support the efficient creation of descriptive multimedia libraries and to facilitate searching these resources. Due to the sheer volume of information available, it is not sufficient simply to store the digital image, video or audio and replay it at a later date. New technology is needed to create, organize and search these vast multimedia libraries.
In addition to the problems associated with efficiently creating the multimedia library, there are problems with effectively searching it for needed information. Searching text typically involves using keywords. In addition, the multimedia library may be searched based on one or more filter criteria associated with the multimedia for the display of the results. For example, first and second filter criteria may be applied to a descriptive file name associated with a digital image. However, since a comprehensive listing of the content of the digital image within the multimedia library was never created, searching for a specific descriptive file name associated with the digital image would not be possible.
According to one method, to facilitate searching the multimedia database, descriptors may be manually associated with object data within the digital image in order to more efficiently search for specific digital images or video clips, for example; however, the descriptors associated with the object data must be manually entered. For example, a user typically must review each object in an image and then manually enter a descriptor to be associated with the viewed image. However, this process is time-consuming, inefficient and cost-prohibitive and, as a result, is often not performed. Further, manually entering a descriptor for association with image data increases the likelihood that a selected object may be stored under different descriptors due to misspelling of the descriptor or variant spellings of the same descriptor. As a result, such a method for creating the multimedia library limits the search to descriptors previously manually associated with the multimedia library and, therefore, does not permit the retrieval of an image with a misspelled descriptor or with no descriptor previously associated with the object. Consequently, an effective, thorough search of the multimedia database is not possible.